Alan O'Reilly

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243 appearances 1 recordings 1 series first heard Aug 2026 last heard 4 Aug

Alan O'Reilly’s voice in public audio — every appearance, attributed to the second.

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The Big Tech Show · Blame it on the weatherman? Alan O'Reilly (Carlow Weather) on the technology of forecasting · 4 Aug 2026 podcast

There's a big high pressure.

It's going to sit here for another week.

You know, the weather forecast is pretty simple.

But now we have a low pressure system trying to move up from the southwest and the weather models are really struggling.

And this week, actually, is a great example of how all these weather models start with the same data, but end up with slightly different output.

And even within the one weather model, there's a thing called ensembles.

which is where the ECMWF, for example, the European weather model, starts off at a starting point and it changes the details a little bit.

And then you see all these lines I share on my social media, which is a scatter.

And the tighter those lines are, basically, the more agreement there is that this is what's going to happen.

It's an interesting one in terms of the physics around it and trying to see where these supercomputers... Because obviously back in the day, people were drawing these by hand.

And now supercomputers are doing this constantly and really aggressively.

So I can't tell you exactly why they're different, but obviously the algorithm is slightly different.

Well, a lot of it is also, it's based on historical weather information.

So we would often say, for example, the weather models struggle in certain setups in Ireland.

You would hear people say that.

And people say to me, how can a weather model struggle?

So if you think about, if we don't very often get a really cold spell from the northeast or the east, like we got in 2010 or 2018,

So the weather model hasn't learned what happens in these scenarios a lot.

So in Ireland, you know, we get the westerlies, you get the south westerlies.

It's pretty much able to predict those very well because it's learning.

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